Article Marketing - What Will it Give You?

If you take a trip through the many Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) forums on the internet, you'll see countless people discussing article marketing, all trying to figure out whether it's a good or a bad thing to do and whether it's worth the effort.

To be able to figure out whether article marketing is right for you, you first need to understand what you will get from it. Article marketing, properly executed, will bring you three things: traffic, backlinks and a reputation.

Many webmasters make the mistake of believing that submitting articles to ezine websites or article directories for reprint will result in instant traffic. This is not true. Article marketing can take time to have a sustainable impact on your traffic. This is because the traffic will not come predominantly from the article directory site that you submitted the article to. It's far more likely that the traffic will come from the many other websites that have picked up your article either via syndication, RSS or simply through reprinting it with your author links. This takes time.

Given that your levels of traffic and the number of backlinks out there to your site are inextricably linked, the real benefit of article marketing is not in the direct traffic it generates but in the backlinks created to your website via the author links. Although you can't really control the quality of sites that reprint your article in this way, there is still no substitute for quantity. You can then work separately on ensuring a decent number of high quality links are also established. This boost in the number of general backlinks to your site will reflect well in the search engine result pages (SERPs), possibly moving you higher up the results and improving your pagerank in the long term. There is still some debate in the SEO forums over the importance of backlinks and pagerank in search engine positioning, but it is generally accepted that having large numbers of quality backlinks and a resulting high pagerank is desirable.

One of the keys to successful article marketing is to ensure you always write on a subject that you have a sound knowledge of. A high quality article will be picked up and reproduced much more quickly than one thrown together or poorly written. Take time to think about your subject matter, how popular it might be, what keywords people will use to find it and what angle you want to take on the subject.

Don't get caught in the 'quantity over quality' trap. Yes, you will need to be able to write lots of articles to get significant benefits, but they will also need to be high quality articles. Don't sacrifice quality - you'll benefit in the long term. This is how you build your reputation as a specialist in your subject area. With hard work, quality articles and a little time, your article marketing strategy can establish you as a specialist in your field that others will seek out for more information. The only way is up.

Do you want to get started as a writer? Do you want to improve the standard of your everyday writing? If so, visit freewritingadvice.com for punctuation, language and grammar tips as well as articles on creative, non-fiction, article and even technical writing.